Leningrad

by Anna Reid

  At the end of February 1942 the Radio Committee announced that the orchestra was being reconstituted, and broadcast an appeal requesting all musicians left in the city to report for registration. When only sixteen did so, Eliasberg hauled himself out of the statsionar in the Hotel Astoria and hobbled from apartment to apartment urging the bedridden on to their feet. The first rehearsals, an oboist remembers, were only forty minutes long, and she was embarrassed to see friends’ faces dirty with soot, and lice crawling over their collars. Meals were provided, though most took the extra food home to their families. A first concert – of waltzes, and extracts from The Nutcracker and Swan Lake – was held on 5 April, in the vast Aleksandrinsky Theatre. The oboist watched Eliasberg mount the podium:

  Karl Ilyich came out all starched, in tails. But when he raised his arms his hands shook. I had this feeling that he was a bird that had just been shot, that at any moment he would plummet to the ground . . . After a while his hands stopped shaking, and he began to conduct.

  When we finished the first piece the audience started to applaud, but there was no sound because everyone was wearing mittens. Looking out at the crowd, you couldn’t tell who was a man and who was a woman – the women were all wrapped up, and the men were wearing scarves and shawls, or even women’s fur coats. Afterwards we were all so inspired, because we knew that we had done our job and that our work would continue.12

  Rehearsals for the Shostakovich began in mid-July, only a few weeks before the premiere. Scored for eight horns, six trombones, five timpanists, two harps and a minimum of sixty-two strings, the symphony far outran the Radio Committee’s resources, though extra brass players were drafted in from military bands, and given manual workers’ ration cards. Microfilm of the score arrived by air from Sweden, and each musician copied out his own part by hand. The male players were provided with jackets and the females with dark dresses – though they looked, the oboist remembered, as if they were hanging on coathangers. On the morning of the concert – its date the first anniversary of that on which Hitler was said to have planned to hold a victory banquet at the Astoria – General Govorov mounted a special Operation Squall, so as to prevent disruption from air raids or barrages. Inside the grandee-packed auditorium the performance itself was ragged, but the atmosphere overwhelming. ‘Some wept’, remembered a woman in the audience,

  because that was the only way in which they could express their excitement, others because they had lived through what the music was now expressing with such force, many because they were grieving for those they had lost, many because they were overcome with the mere fact of being present here in the Philharmonia.

  During the finale everyone stood: ‘It was impossible to listen sitting down. Impossible.’13 The besieging Germans, hearing the music ring out from loudspeakers across no-man’s-land, are said to have realised at that moment that the war in the East would never be won – Leningrad was invincible, and so was Mother Russia.

  It is a wonderful story, but seems to resonate more in retrospect than it did among Leningraders at the time. Few diarists mention the concert, and then only in passing. The chameleon Seventh – by turns menacing, nervy, terrifying and transcendent – perhaps better suited the summer of 1941, when Shostakovich wrote it, than numbed, emptied 1942. As Vera Inber, who attended the Leningrad premiere, wrote in her diary when she got home, ‘The rumbling approach of the German tanks – there it was. But the shining conclusion is yet to come.’14 Later the symphony became a pawn of the Cold War, played to death in the Soviet Union and written off as a bombastic slice of Stalinism in the West. Shostakovich was able to clear its name only posthumously, via memoirs written by friends. Composing the famous ‘Fascist’ pipe and drum march, he explained, he had had in mind not only the Nazis but ‘other enemies of humanity . . . I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but no less pain for those killed on Stalin’s orders. I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot or starved to death. There were millions of them in our country before the war with Hitler began.’15

  The other great recovery story of 1942 is that of Leningrad’s children. At the beginning of the siege children aged twelve and under made up just under 20 per cent of Leningrad’s civilian population of 2.4 million. By May, 170,000 had either died or been evacuated over the Ice Road, and thousands more had been orphaned or left without care.16 One of the most oft-quoted records of the siege, scribbled in pencil over the pages of a pocket address book, is that kept by twelve-year-old Tanya Savicheva:

  28 December 1941 at 12.30 a.m. – Zhenya died. 25 January 1942 at 3 p.m. – Granny died. 17 March at 5 a.m. – Lyoka died. 13 April at 2 a.m. – Uncle Vasya died. 10 May at 4 p.m. – Uncle Lyosha died. 13 May at 7.30 a.m. – Mama died. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.

  From January onwards teams of civil defence workers, mostly young women in their late teens or twenties, did the rounds of ‘dead’ flats picking up children like Tanya. They were handed in to police-run reception centres, similar to those opened five years earlier to process the offspring of purge victims. From the centres younger children, aged three to thirteen, were transferred to 130 new children’s homes (ninety-eight in the city, thirty-two in surrounding towns and villages) which opened from January to March. By the end of the year 26,250 children had been taken in, 54 per cent of them orphaned, 30 per cent with a single parent serving in the forces.17

  Older children were enrolled with civil defence teams or factories, either directly or via trade schools. Fourteen-year-old Galina Vishnevskaya, abandoned in Kronshtadt by her father and stepmother, joined an all-women civil defence brigade. She lived in barracks, wore a boiler suit and learned how to shoulder planks, dig up broken pipes, drink vodka, smoke makhorka and sing jazz to sailors. ‘It was’, as she put it in her memoirs, ‘no institute for aristocratic young ladies . . . I came to know life as it really is – life as I would never have known it under other conditions.’18

  Another sole survivor child, aged eight at the time, was Irina Bogdanova. Her family had already been half-destroyed by the Terror, during which her paternal grandparents were exiled to Archangel and her father, a journalist on Leningradskaya Pravda, committed suicide. Irina – a plump, pretty girl in white socks with blonde pigtails – was brought up by her mother (a frequently absent geologist), aunt and grandmother in a flat on Barmaleyev Street, on the Petrograd Side. Come February 1942, the adults succumbed one by one to dysentery, leaving Irina alone with the corpses of her mother and grandmother. She was picked up ten days later by a twenty-one-year-old civil defence worker, who handed her in to the police together with her clothes, shoes and unused ration card (‘Just think, in those conditions, how honest she was not to take it!’ Irina exclaims now). On her registration form someone first wrote ‘boy’ and then corrected it to ‘girl’. The days Irina spent alone are a blank: the first thing she remembers is waking in a large, light room and realising that the girl with whom she was sharing a bed was dead. This was not unusual: of the 4,508 children received into ten suburban orphanages, 682 died, mostly within a few days of admission.19

  Through the spring and summer of 1942 the orphanages – 38,080 children in total – were evacuated to the ‘mainland’.20 Shuffled between overburdened local administrations, they often travelled for weeks, ending up in deep countryside far from medical services or communications. An extreme case was Children’s Home no. 82, whose 135 orphans ended up quartered in two small, unlit huts in a tiny settlement in western Siberia, twenty-five kilometres from the nearest telegraph and 800 kilometres from a railway line.21 Irina was evacuated with her Children’s Home no. 57 to a village in Yaroslavl province. Life there she remembers as ‘hard but good’. The children slept on hay-filled mattresses, were put to serious work collecting mushrooms and berries – none could be eaten until one had fulfilled one’s norm – and ostracised if caught filching food. Irina had to apologise in front of the whole school after she was caught digging the crumb out of a loaf on the way
home from the village bakery, squishing it together with buds pulled off overhanging lime trees: ‘They were sweet and sticky, and so good with the bread – I remember the taste even now.’22

  For children as for adults, of course, recovery entailed much more than better rations. Survivors remember persistent anxiety, dull-wittedness, distrust of adults and obsession with food. Asked if she liked gingerbread, a girl in evacuation in the Urals didn’t understand the question: ‘I remember sitting there and wondering – What does it mean this “nice” or “not nice”? . . . What is this phrase “I don’t want to eat”?’ At night she sneaked outdoors and dug in a nearby field for bread, which she believed grew underground like potatoes. ‘I thought that all I had to do was dig a small hole and there I’d find a fresh loaf. I’d take it and eat my fill.’23 A paediatrician gave the children on her ward drawing materials: one drew a clock face, captioned ‘This is our watch. It tells us when we can eat the next little piece of bread’; another, a nine-year-old boy, drew a large black square.24 An entrant in a story competition imagined the vegetables she was cultivating in her school allotment as tiny people with green legs and heads, who ran up the stairs of an apartment building to save a thin, golden-haired girl, or raced through shellfire to a Red Army dugout.25 Other children hoarded obsessively, collecting crumbs in matchboxes, developed stammers or would not speak at all.26 For teachers, one of the most cheering signs of recovery was when their pupils started misbehaving again. One girl, told to report to her headmistress for running out on to the street, was amazed when the usually stern woman burst into tears: ‘It was our first childish prank; it meant that we were returning to life and that made them very happy.’27

  Saved by a school, in the role of teacher rather than pupil, was Olga Grechina. Since the beginning of the war she had dug trenches, worked in factories, cleared snow, had several close shaves during air raids and lost her mother to starvation. Her sixteen-year-old brother Vovka had turned into a stranger, appearing at their flat only rarely and with odd new possessions – clothes, a bicycle and jars of half-rotten salted tomatoes – which he fantastically claimed had been lent by relatives or turned out of the Smolniy’s cellars. ‘Already’, she wrote, ‘he wasn’t the same happy little elephant who all my schoolfriends adored, a bit of a coward and none too keen on his lessons.’ In May 1942 all became clear, when she heard that he had been arrested for stealing – not only from bread shops, she discovered, but from neighbours and relatives, including two spinster aunts whose cards he had taken, promising to return with their rations; they had subsequently died of starvation. Despite doing the rounds of the police stations and joining the long, silent queues outside the Kresty, Olga had no further news of her brother until the summer of the following year, when she received official notification that he had died of ‘dystrophy’ in a camp in Yaroslavl province.

  After Vovka’s arrest, Olga suffered a nervous breakdown. Forced to sell remaining family valuables to an avaricious schoolfriend (her parents’ silver wedding anniversary tea set went for a few roubles, an oak table for two kilos of millet), she felt surrounded on all sides by loss and betrayal, started to suffer hallucinations and fell into deep depression. Attending teacher training in response to a radio appeal for nursery school staff, she sat at the back and slept:

  I woke rarely and couldn’t write or remember anything. Luckily there were no exams – I would have failed them. There were a couple of nice girls there but I spoke to them robotically – I think they thought that I was mentally handicapped. And this was actually true, since I remember nothing from June. I don’t remember what I ate, who I saw, or any other details of my life then. I didn’t feel that I was dying, but that I was already dead.28

  Her salvation was Boarding School no. 43, a tightly run, well-connected institution housed in a handsome nineteenth-century building one block down from the Hermitage on the Neva (and still there today). The headmistress, presented with a skinny, spectacled twenty-year-old with a plait pinned round the top of her head and darned socks, immediately despatched her to dig potatoes at the school’s affiliated collective farm, where she was fed cabbage soup, dozed through the days with her ‘nose in the earth’, and opened up to fellow staff, mostly newly widowed university lecturers, through the long pale evenings. In September they returned to the city and Olga was put to mending schoolbooks (‘It was very hard not to eat the paste, made from pure white flour’) before being given charge of a class of thirty-five ‘no longer starving, and quite lively’ four-year-olds. ‘You are not herding children’, she was told, ‘you are bringing them up.’

  The job was an extraordinary one. The teachers lived full-time at the school, together with 120 four- to seven-year-olds. At night – when not taking the children down to the air-raid shelter – they slept on pushed-together tables, and during the day not only taught, but stoked stoves, hauled water up two flights of stairs from the unlit basement of a neighbouring building, washed and dried sheets (six of Olga’s group were bed-wetters), flushed out lavatories, folded and unfolded camp beds (four times a day, taking into account afternoon naps) and shaved the children’s heads to rid them of lice. In the evenings they repaired the children’s clothes, reusing buttons and elastic. There was no soap, no toothpaste and so little crockery that everyone drank from saucers. Staff were also drafted to outside ‘voluntary’ work, demolishing buildings for firewood and emptying bedpans in a nearby military hospital. Though it was forbidden to talk in front of children about the war – they were to be ‘transported to a world of fantasy, fairy tales and art’ – reality inevitably intruded. On walks they competed for spent shot from the anti-aircraft guns on the Kirov, moored nearby on the Neva embankment, and at break-time distressed Olga with their games:

  Today the children found some sort of hole in the yard, and began to dig, chanting, ‘Come on, come on, dig quicker. Our little ones are in there. The Germans have killed them all!’

  Lida: ‘My Vovochka’s in there!’

  Rufa: ‘And my Lilenka and Granny!’ . . .

  Tearing the girls away from this game was very difficult. It fascinated them and they came back to it again and again. It was always Rufa, five years old and the oldest in my class, who started it. She hadn’t been to kindergarten before and had been living with a Granny who fell asleep and didn’t want to wake up any more. Before that there had been a Lilenka – probably a younger sister – who also fell asleep forever.29

  Never having had much to do with small children before, Olga initially found controlling her ‘collective’ almost impossible, but quickly learned the tricks of the trade. At mealtimes she quietened them with the help of a floppy-eared dog glove-puppet that had been her own childhood toy. During air-raids she repeated again and again a tale from the Brothers Grimm, of a magic pot that produces a non-stop flow of sweet golden kasha, so much of it that it pours out of the house and floods the whole town. ‘A mass of energy, time and starch’ went into preparations for New Year’s Day 1943. Besides having to recite crass poems in praise of Voroshilov, distributed by the city education department, the children dressed up as snowflakes, rabbits and bears, and a teacher as Snegurochka – Russia’s Little Snow Girl, grand-daughter of Grandfather Frost – juggling snowballs made of cotton wool. Aunt Motya, the incorruptible eighty-year-old School cook, made pirozhki out of carefully hoarded flour. Olga stayed with School no. 43 all the way through to the autumn of 1944, before resuming her university degree. It had not only saved her from despair but given her ‘a place in the world’. ‘I felt that I needed people’, she wrote later, ‘and that they might need me.’

  *In private he was more cynical: ‘If Hitler invaded Hell’, he famously told his private secretary later the same night, ‘I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.’

  21

  The Last Year

  Hitler’s objectives for 1942 included Leningrad. It was to be stormed, a Führer Directive of 5 April instructed, as soon as victory in th
e Crimea had freed up the necessary armour and artillery, in an operation to be code-named Nordlicht, or ‘Northern Light’.1 Ignoring his generals’ pleas for another attempt on Moscow, Hitler reiterated his intention after Sevastopol’s capture, ordering Manstein to lead five divisions and a giant railway gun, the ‘Heavy Gustav’, north.2 ‘St Petersburg’, he mused over lunch a few days later, ‘must disappear utterly from the surface of the earth. Moscow, too. Then the Russians will retire into Siberia.’3 Far from retiring to Siberia, in mid-August the Red Army launched its fourth attempt to break the Germans’ hold on the southern shores of Lake Ladoga, concentrating on the already blood-soaked Sinyavino ridge south of Shlisselburg. Manstein’s new divisions were able to prevent a breakthrough, but not to embark on Nordlicht. Meanwhile, Hitler also launched Operation Blau (‘Blue’), his mighty southward push towards rhe Caucasus and Central Asia. Rostov-on-Don fell in the last week of July, and by mid-August panzers were pushing into the foothills of the Caucasus, within tantalising reach of the Baku oilfields.

  Beneath the surface, though, the war was beginning to tip in Russia’s favour. By autumn the Wehrmacht was grossly overstretched: its supply lines thin, its recruits ever younger and rawer, and its generals increasingly yes-men – ‘nodding donkeys’, as Speer called them4 – of the Führer. (Halder resigned in September, bewailing Hitler’s ‘fits of insane rage’ and ‘chronic tendency to underrate the enemy’.) The Red Army, in contrast, was beginning to pull itself together. Unlike Hitler, Stalin had begun to realise that military decisions were better left to the professionals. Increasingly, he listened to his generals, and in October stripped the political commissars who dogged regular officers’ footsteps of most of their powers. Lend-Lease supplies were beginning to arrive overland via Vladivostok and Tehran, instead of on the precarious Arctic convoys, and weapons production was increasing, especially of the robust, reliable T-34 tank and PPSh-41 sub-machine gun.